In honour of Felix Klein’s birthday, Matt Parker and Katie Steckles investigate the amazing surface which bears his name.
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Math/Maths 93: TW’s School of Hard Sums
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about Dara O Briain’s School of Hard Sums with ‘Maths Advisor’ and special guest Thomas Woolley, also with each other about: The game of go as a complex network; The Trapezium Conundrum; European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad; QAMA Calculator; Gowers and Penrose popular lectures; Travelling Salesman Movie; and more.
Get this episode: Math/Maths 93: TW’s School of Hard Sums
UK Open Sudoku and Puzzle Tournaments
Yes, I know Sudoku isn’t really maths, but anyone interested in puzzles might want to know about this event, held in Manchester next week.
The UK Puzzle Association is a non-profit organisation that selects the UK teams for the World Puzzle Championships and World Sudoku Championships, which this year will be held in Kraljevica, Croatia in October. The UKPA’s website is here, and they clearly know their puzzles, since they had nice things to say about PuzzleBomb.
Japanese researchers create a crab-based computer
This is the platonic ideal of an entry in my Interesting Esoterica collection: two scientists from Kobe University and one from UWE’s excellently-named International Center of Unconventional Computing have written a paper, Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate, claiming that swarms of soldier crabs Mictyris guinotae can be persuaded to act as logic gates, from which a universal computer could be built. The paper first describes how they modelled swarms of crabs, then how the logic gates are implemented, and ends with data from an experiment with real soldier crabs. The AND gate worked about two thirds of the time, which isn’t bad.
It looks like this paper is a follow-up to the earlier work, Slime mould logical gates: exploring ballistic approach, which did basically the same thing on a smaller scale. I can only think that the next step must be to use humans.
I’ve given a talk about other unlikely computing machines: I can’t believe it’s a universal computer!
(via Slashdot)
Hunger Games survival analysis
Somebody has done a statistical analysis of The Hunger Games, to see how the lottery works and what factors, if any, are linked with longer survival. Yes, he describes his methodology in fine detail. Wonderfully overthought.
A comment by yellowcandy in the MetaFilter thread about this page warns us not to get too carried away:
I love statistics, but come on: The major finding here is that Suzanne Collins did a good job creating a fictional dataset that shows some significant differences between groups. Yes, that’s because statistics measures deviations from randomness, and Collins *made up the data* as part of her novel’s plot.
(via MetaFilter)
Maths and Music Lecture April 23rd Thame | Pulse-Project.org
Dr Thomas Woolley of Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute will give a lecture on ‘Maths and Music’ on Monday 23 April at Thame Town Hall, starting at 7.30pm. The abstract follows. Free tickets are available from Thame Town Hall.
Music is the expression of thoughts, ideas and feelings.Mathematics is the language of fact, rigour and knowledge. They seem separate, but they are linked. Join us on a tour of only a few of these connections and leave with an appreciation of both. Although Dr Woolley’s work mostly involves using mathematics to research the skin patterns of animals, he also spends much of his time explaining mathematics to the “man in the street”. Dr Woolley has been involved in a number of mathematical workshops, activities and talks for the public, such as the Mathemusica group which opened the Oxford Science Festival in March with a performance fusing mathematics and music. “As an academic I spend most of my time producing mathematics that very few people would understand”, says Dr Woolley, “The goal is to push back the boundaries of knowledge, make the unknown known, and pure mathematicians aside, make the world a better place”.
Source: Pulse-Project.org: Maths and Music Lecture April 23rd Thame.
School of Hard Sums doubles the normal Dave audience
Last night saw the debut of Dave’s ‘School of Hard Sums’, a slightly strange but enjoyable maths show from Dara O Briain and Marcus du Sautoy. Was the show a success? Today Dara tweeted:
So, would viewers of Dave actually want to watch a show about maths? Turns out… yes. We got double the normal audience. Yay for maths!
— Dara O Briain (@daraobriain) April 17, 2012
Of course, the show received a good deal of advertising – but it seems like good news nonetheless.